From a Student Who Dreamed of Writing to a Voice Actor Who Writes Again
People who have only encountered me through my voice might think, “Wait, you write too?” But before I dreamed of becoming a voice actor, my dream in high school was to write. One thing led to another, and my dream changed along the way.
After working on Aladdin, I was interviewed by the Korean film magazine Cine21 and mentioned that I had originally wanted to be a writer. The reporter later became the editor of the Korean edition of The Big Issue, and he contacted me because he remembered that conversation. I happened to be considering a new challenge at the time, so I began writing a monthly essay for the magazine.
As the essays piled up, the editor suggested turning them into a book. That became my first essay collection, What the Voice Does. About two years later, I was asked to write a book that could inspire young people, and that became May Your Voice Resound. I plan to keep writing.
I tried to organize my thoughts in writing because it helped my acting. I have always believed that voice acting is the center and backbone of my work, and I want to remain a voice actor for the rest of my life. Writing is not a detour. I see it as a means of making my work as a voice actor deeper and more solid.
It began with a literary festival organized by my high school literary club during my second year. At the time, television aired many dubbed foreign films, and I loved movies and the voices of the actors who dubbed them, so I watched them all. While listening to the radio, I discovered KBS Stage, a radio-drama program on South Korea's public broadcaster KBS, and I wondered whether we could perform a short radio drama live at the festival. I proposed the idea to my teacher and friends, wrote it myself, and put it onstage. It was the first time I experienced being both a writer and a voice actor.
Becoming a Voice Actor, One Small Step at a Time
The literary festival project had not felt especially difficult to me, so at the time I thought I might have a touch of genius. I imagined entering a major literary contest or writing a film screenplay, but when I actually tried to write in earnest, nothing came to mind. I had placed without much difficulty in regional competitions, but when I entered a major competition in Seoul, there were so many talented students. For the first time, I saw the larger world and ran into a wall. I decided writing was not my path and privately declared that I was giving it up before my career as a writer had even begun.
I entered a humanities program without giving it much thought, and I spent much of my first year at university feeling lost. I did not fit comfortably into any club, but then I followed a friend to an audition for the campus broadcasting station. I had my experience from the literary festival and had listened to voice actors for years, so I thought I might try it myself. The response to my practical audition was good, and I began working as an announcer at the station. As I experienced news and drama, I started to wonder whether I might have a talent I had never known about.
At the same time, I was afraid that I might encounter another wall on a larger stage, just as I had with writing. I joined a group for aspiring voice actors because I wanted to find out whether I was suited to expressing myself before others through my voice. My family had expected someone with my personality to choose a stable career, so I think they felt I had suddenly decided to do something completely unexpected. I also thought of myself as someone who sought stability, so I set an age limit: if I had not succeeded by then, I would turn back. With that line in place, I became an aspiring voice actor.
Finding His Own Individuality Alongside Midoriya
When the Korean-language dub of My Hero Academia was produced, I was still a rookie who had only recently begun working as a freelancer. I think one reason I drew attention at the time was that I sounded a little different from established voice actors. My voice was not fully settled; it sounded plain and young, and I considered that a weakness.
Midoriya was cast through a combination of an event-style viewer poll and the producer's opinion. Fans who had heard my voice in other works recommended me, and I am grateful that it became the role I recorded for longer than any other.
I had read the manga first, and beyond voice acting as a career, I became deeply immersed in the character himself. Midoriya lives in a society where everyone has a superhuman ability called a Quirk. He believes he was born without one, yet still wants to become a hero. I strongly identified with the process of watching him grow.
In Korean, the word used for that ability, gaeseong, is also the ordinary word for a person's individuality. That overlap made Midoriya's story resonate all the more strongly with my own search for individuality in my voice.
After being selected for Daewon Broadcasting's second voice-actor intake, I worked under an initial exclusive term before going freelance. Just before that transition, the head of production told me that I needed to develop the individuality of my voice. He meant that I had less distinction than other actors and could easily be overlooked. I was wondering how I could make people hear the individuality in my voice. Those concerns overlapped so strongly with Midoriya that, after I was cast and began working on the series, I was even more surprised. I kept wondering how a character like this had come to me, and I felt deeply grateful.
Over a long period, Midoriya keeps running into walls, breaking through them, and growing. At the wrap party after the final recording, Yoon Mi-na, who voiced Ochaco Uraraka, told me something. She had thought of me as an actor with the sensitivity to render fragile emotions in detail. But Midoriya also has a hot-blooded side: the volcanic passion for heroism inside him erupts, and he has to shout at full force. She had watched nervously, wondering whether I could pull that off. To be honest, I had worried about the same thing at first. I practiced shouting the names of his techniques over and over. When I finished the final recording, I thought, “We really made it this far.” It is a work that was bound to leave a deeper impression on me than any other.
The Unfamiliar Voice Xiao Helped Him Discover
I never imagined that Xiao would become such a significant presence for me. Most game-recording sessions begin before we know what the game is. We receive the script on-site and perform it on the spot. I briefly review the character description, illustration, and role in the world, listen to a voice that has already been recorded in another language, and then begin.
The role the production team presented as Xiao's prototype was Khun Aguero Agnis from Tower of God. But Xiao's sorrow and the emotional weight he carried were far deeper and heavier. I thought a slightly more boyish quality would suit him, but the production team kept asking for a lower register. Because I had not seen the finished visuals, I could not be sure that the voice would truly fit the character. I had no choice but to trust the production team.
When the promotional video was later released, it felt as though a new part of my voice—different in character from my earlier performances—had been developed. Listeners seemed to feel the same way, and I think that is why the character received so much love.
My voice never changed dramatically during puberty, so its childlike quality was a source of insecurity. From high school onward, I practiced trying to make it lower and thicker. After becoming a voice actor, I corrected the bad habit of forcing my voice below its natural register, and at first I mainly played boys. I auditioned for both the boy and young-adult versions of Kyuta in The Boy and the Beast. Kim Seo-young, a senior voice actor from MBC, played the boy, while I played the young-adult Kyuta. That role expanded my range into young-man roles. After playing Chiaki in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, I eventually met Xiao.
Xiao filled the space between Shim Kyu-hyeok in boy roles and Shim Kyu-hyeok in young-man roles. He helped me discover a part of myself I did not know I had and break down assumptions about my own voice. Encountering a role like that is a rare and precious experience. I hope I can continue to meet characters who bring out new sides of me.
While preparing for this interview, I went back and read the comments on the promotional video. Many people wrote that they had started Genshin Impact because of Xiao, or that they had come to like me through him. I am deeply grateful for Xiao. I want to thank everyone who loves him once again, and I will continue to do my best to bring you his voice.
Living with Anxiety Instead of Erasing It
My first book, What the Voice Does, came out in 2022, and my second, May Your Voice Resound, was published in 2024. It was less a firm decision to work as a writer alongside voice acting than something that unfolded naturally. When I look closely at why I kept a journal and left so many notes, it ultimately comes down to anxiety. Writing seems to have been an escape—a way to relieve that anxiety.
In 2020, I reached my tenth year as a voice actor. Even though I had done far better than I could have imagined as a rookie, my place still did not feel secure. No matter how many works a voice actor has done in the past, income only comes from continuing to work. If your health or your voice prevents you from accepting a role, you can feel that everything might end at that moment. Work does not arrive at a steady, regular pace either. At times it floods in, and at others it recedes like the tide.
It took my wife twelve years to pass the voice actor audition. Wanting to help her, I continually wrote down what I had learned and shared it with her, but looking back, I think I may have been more anxious than she was. I was afraid that marriage and children might force her to give up her dream. Once our first child arrived and parenting began, I realized that my efforts to help might actually become a burden to her.
That was when I began to reconsider what I wanted to do. I wondered what I could write besides a journal and enrolled in an essay-writing class. Once parenting began, time was scarce, and the anxiety did not disappear.
As a rookie, I wanted to know how I could act without trembling. With time, the people I worked with became familiar and the tension naturally eased, but then I had to begin fighting complacency. Once the anxiety disappeared, I wondered whether I was simply continuing on momentum. I had to fight the feeling of fumbling forward without anything by which to measure myself.
In the end, what mattered was not eliminating anxiety but considering how to live with it wisely. The dream of a world without problems, conflict, or anxiety may itself be an illusion. Problems arise because there is something we want to do, and those problems can also give us passion. Even emotions that appear negative can be signs pointing us in a better direction. I hope people do not try so hard to eliminate anxiety that they end up avoiding things or pushing themselves too harshly.
A Voice Gives Form to an Unseen Character
If a voice is a kind of substance, it exists but cannot be seen. While writing my first book, I thought that a voice might be like an invisible person. You cannot see an invisible person, but if you cover them in flour or drench them in water, their form suddenly appears. Perhaps a good voice actor is someone who uses a voice to make that invisible figure appear in more concrete detail. Even now, I believe the most important thing is to make the character feel three-dimensional.
Voice actors and on-screen actors both act, but their working methods and the abilities they need are very different. They may seem like similar disciplines, but they use different muscles. A voice actor needs not only depth but also spontaneity and quick thinking, because so much of the work must be produced quickly.
I think the most essential ability for a voice actor is to deliver a line so that it feels memorized even when it is not, and so that it sounds spoken rather than read even while you are reading it. In game recording, you may arrive on-site, see the script for the first time, and have to create a voice for a particular storyboard on the spot. You have to analyze it intuitively in a very short time.
You have to play with text a great deal. Just as basketball or soccer players must be able to handle a ball almost as if it were part of their bodies, text is the ball for us. As a rookie, I was unsettled because I thought I was not especially quick-thinking, but I learned that those abilities could also be developed and trained. In the end, it depends on how deeply and how often you engage with text, which is why the fundamentals matter.
Finding Your Own Standard, Not Someone Else's Answer
When you look at veterans or people who have accomplished something in their field, you may wonder how they reached that point, whether you could do the same, or whether you are suited to the profession at all. I want to confess one thing to aspiring voice actors: I worked extremely hard too. Whenever a project came in, I prepared so intensely that my wife would ask, “Do you really have to go that far?”
But I am not trying to offer the cliché that because I worked hard, anyone can do it. I did not practice because I wanted to become a great voice actor and leave behind a legend. Practice was so difficult that I kept looking for ways to make it less painful and to do it better. That is how I arrived here.
No matter how successful someone is, what they say is only a reference book. The main textbook must ultimately be yourself. You need your own standards instead of allowing yourself to be swayed too much by what others say. You must define for yourself why you want to do this work and how much better you want to become, and it is important to take responsibility for that definition.
I do not know how long my career as a voice actor will continue, so I keep trying. I am still in the process of learning and training in anything that might help my acting. I will keep doing my best to hold on in the recording studio, and I hope those preparing to become voice actors will succeed so that we can meet there. I will be waiting.
A Life on His Own Terms—and the Act of Recording It
I first began to consider voice acting in the second semester of my first year at university, when I took that step toward the campus broadcasting station. If you asked whether I would make the same choice if I could return to that moment, I do not think there was another path open to me. I did not become a voice actor because of a sudden flash of inspiration. Small steps accumulated and led me into this profession, so I would probably follow a similar path again.
The life of a voice actor I had dreamed of was not what I expected. I thought things would become easier once I had built up a certain body of work, but they did not. I have to keep working and developing. It can be exhausting and difficult, yet I feel that this kind of difficulty suits me. After experiencing work that was steady and repetitive, I realized that it did not suit me at all. Work that does not unfold according to a fixed pattern keeps me alert and makes me feel alive. I remain anxious and afraid, but because this is a form of hardship that suits me, I do not regret my choice.
If I watch this video ten years from now, I think I will be glad that I left this record. Writing is the same: if you do not write things down in the moment, you forget what you were thinking and what kinds of anxiety and joy you were living through. This interview may also become one part of my diary.
Script analysis and training have certainly played a role in allowing me to work as a voice actor for sixteen years. But above all, everything I have done could have meaning because there were people who listened to my voice. Listeners, viewers, and fans are like my breath. I am always grateful to everyone who tells me that my voice has comforted or encouraged them.
I also feel sorry that I was not able to communicate very much while raising two children. Now that they are getting a little older, I am preparing to restart the YouTube channel I had put on hold and become active again on social media, where I had not posted often. I have also opened an online class to share what I have learned through acting with aspiring voice actors. Today's interview feels like part of that same movement.
I will continue to work hard on my projects. Please continue to support me, and I will continue to support you as well.